Dimension Data, a global solutions and services provider, said today that it will quadruple the size of its data centre business to $4 billion in the next five years.

Steve Joubert, Group Executive for the Data Centre Business Unit (image: supplied)

The Group’s existing $1 billion data centre business has a significant presence in all major regions. It is looking to aggressively grow and scale these businesses both organically and through acquisitions. In addition, Dimension Data believes its access to a significant set of data centre assets across its parent company, the NTT Group, differentiates the business.

“In all regions and with all clients, large and small, there is an urgent need to undergo the transformation process needed to not only achieve better data centre performance and manage disruptive technologies but also to become progressively greener, in terms of environmental custodianship,” says Steve Joubert, Group Executive for the Data Centre Business Unit.

“Although all our markets are targeting exponential growth, our analysis shows there’ll be higher rates of growth in mature regions such as Europe and North America, given the legacy data centre investments in those geographies that require transformation. For many organisations, the most cost effective way of navigating the future will be through IT-as-a-Service, managed services, and outsourcing.”

Joubert says that the cloud, virtualisation 3.0, and software-defined everything have changed the data centre landscape forever. “New workloads, users, connected devices, and locations are compounding the pressure on the data centre and our clients are asking for help in dealing with all of this in a way that helps their data centre become a true ‘business response centre’, capable of being agile and speedy when the business needs it to be.”

“Getting there requires an integrated approach in the secure delivery of workloads and applications across the traditional data centre, cloud and the enterprise network, all of which make up the next-generation data centre. This calls for a level and range of capabilities that the average organisation doesn’t have and shouldn’t need to build or acquire when all the considerable benefits of cloud, networking, security, and systems integration experience as well as economies of scale and a global footprint are available through Dimension Data.”

Currently Dimension Data operates 12 public cloud locations around the world and further locations coming online in the next few quarters. Dimension Data significantly extends its cloud locations through its OneCloud partners, giving it one of the largest cloud footprints in the world.

Additionally, Dimension Data offers its clients the significant benefits of its membership of the NTT Group. NTT is the world’s second largest provider of data centre space, with some 243 secure data centres globally. Dimension Data also has access to NTT Data’s application and workload capabilities in industrial-strength solutions and services around SAP for example; and to the 6,000 engineers in NTT Facilities who have built some of the most advanced data centres in the world.

“This, coupled with our investment in people, process, and management capabilities focused on managing the next-generation data centre, gives us a massive advatage in the market,” Joubert says.